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From: "credoquaabsurdum" <credoquaabsurdum@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.languages.english
Subject: Re: used to
Date: 12 Jul 2005 06:08:03 -0700
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Mike Lyle wrote:
> credoquaabsurdum wrote:
> [...]
> > ...and everyone knows, of course, that nothing has changed in the
> > English language since 1968...
>
> One thing that _has_ got frozen, however, is the Latin for "because".
> Unless I'm missing a trick, of course: but I know Tertullian didn't
> actually say it.
>
> --
> Mike.
Well, you're missing a minor trick. A very minor one. "Quai" in
Classical Latin was occassionally written as "qua" in Vulgate.
I first saw "credo, qua absurdum" in the Dover Thrift Edition of
Freud's _Civilization and its Discontents_ back when I was in my junior
year of college. It was in a footnote: Freud explained that it was what
the Roman senators would shout from the back benches of the Forum in
response to inane comments by the speaker. I took a shine to it
immediately. This was well before I ever heard of Tertullian. I think I
kind of explained this in a post in MELE once upon a time.
My email handle dates back to then, and adding the "i" to make it
conform to classical Latin (and Tertullian) would create all sorts of
difficulties for people who have known me through the years.
Later, I also came to like my handle because of the fact that the man
who felt it important to point out that the difference between "m" and
"n" made him feel uneasy (in _The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_)
would unconsciously leave out an "i" in his writings. Consciously
repeating Freud's unconscious mistake (or perhaps the whole of Vulgate
Latin's unconscious mistake) is one of the many private (by virtue of
being impossibly arcane) jokes regarding erudition that get me through
the day.
You gotta wake up earlier in the morning than that, Mike...especially
since, unless I miss my guess, we're not in the same time zone.
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